The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [51]
But she did.
Bean stepped forward slightly, turning her foot out, red-carpet ready, and tilted her head so her hair fell across her face just so. “What a pity,” she said. “And nothing at all to keep you busy all summer long.”
“Oh, I’m teaching the summer workshops, but it’s hardly the same. A handful of students, a handful of hours, and then the thrill of a Barnwell summer evening in an empty house.”
“It certainly hasn’t gotten any more exciting since I left,” Bean said, her eyes darting over him, taking his measure, toying with the possibility. He’d always been handsome, more movie star than any professor had a right to be, but she’d never looked at him as a man, really, only as Dr. Manning’s husband, as the father of the children who played in the waning sunlight of the evenings she spent with them. And those children were nearly grown now, weren’t they? And she was so far away, in both memory and fact. And he was very much here, going soft around the middle, but still broad-shouldered and strong, a toothpaste-commercial smile, and so focused on Bean that her breath seemed to catch in her throat.
“I fear Barnwell in particular would suffer in comparison to New York. You must come over for dinner and tell me all about it. Well, dinner such as it is,” he said, gesturing with the can of soup in his hand.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve always been an incredible cook. Surely you can do better than that on my account,” Bean said.
“Ah, but I recall your being a tremendously picky eater,” he said. It’s true—his gift for culinary invention had rarely pleased her, and she had often replaced his offerings—cold butternut squash soup, buffalo medallions in a wine reduction—with glasses of wine and plates of salad. “But I’ll be happy to challenge myself for you.”
“I’ll drop by, then. Maybe the day after tomorrow?”
“Seven,” he agreed, and it was done without either of them noticing it, or even paying attention to the fact that their bodies were nearly touching, her breast by his arm, her hip along his, a most indecent pose rarely seen in the Market.
“Should I bring the wine?”
“Please don’t. You’ve always had horrible taste in wines.”
“I was nineteen,” Bean shot back, recalling the night she’d arrived at the Mannings’ with a bottle of wine she’d liberated from a roommate’s bookshelf, a sour, watery affair that they’d poured into the garden after one sip. She pushed down the memory of Lila, his wife who had invited her to all those dinners, given Bean knowledge and attention and warmth and asked for nothing in return, except the understood expectation not to try to seduce her husband.
“Neither age nor beauty excuses bad wine. Just bring yourself,” he said. “That’s all we need,” and Bean swayed away charmingly, a trail of tension stretching between them like vibrating wire.
O, let the heavens give him defence against the elements, for I have lost us him on a dangerous sea.
Oh, poor Bean.
EIGHT
Our family has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years. But on the subject of cancer (here comes Cordy’s wording), he is silent as the grave. The word “cancer” appears only once in all of Shakespeare’s works, and it is not a reference to the disease, but comes in Troilus and Cressida in the same stanza as the classical names of Ajax, Achilles, and Jupiter. So we found ourselves mostly at a loss for words to describe what was happening to our mother.
We don’t know how she found the lump, which Bean thinks is clear evidence that our father found it while they were having sex, but it doesn’t matter, really. There was a lump, and they had been to the doctor, first in Barnwell, and then in Columbus, and there had been a biopsy. And the word “malignant” had entered our family’s vernacular.
The morning of our mother’s surgery, we all got up without Rose having to wake us. How long had